Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iran. Show all posts

Saturday 6 September 2014

In this cold, it’s paradise*

This is a Festival review of Iranian (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


6 September

This is a Festival review of Iranian (2014)

As a rarity, Iranian (2014) was interesting, a film dangerous to its maker Mehran Tamadon to have filmed – but could it, for all that, have been better, maybe much better ?



As narrator (over scenes inside a mosque, or of religious veneration on the street), he tells us that he has tried for three years to obtain the agreement of Iranian clerics to spend time in a house together with him, an atheist, so that they can talk about what it is to share a space (the house, which here is his mother’s house, outside Teheran) and what that might be like in The Islamic Republic of Iran – making house rules for the use of the shared parts of the house, which may or may not translate into what should be permissible for people to do generally in that country.

So when four (understandably but regrettably ?) unidentified clerics, two of whom seem more senior to the others (and is referred to as Haji Ali), accept his invitation (and, during the course of settling in, then bring along their families), do we imagine that he would want to be prepared to counter, for example, facile arguments or debating techniques (not least when one of the other men, slighting him comically on camera, asks how he ever read philosophy (when he cannot follow the instructions for ritually washing himself))…?

(Having tried the ritual, he is asked if he felt Incredible joy : twice he took it back to the refreshment of the water (rather than any spiritual quality), and, when he resisted probing as to whether the ritual in itself had been beneficial, he was told Maybe you need to be more attentive, as if the ritual were inherently beneficial and purifying, if he would just notice. Rather pompously and insultingly, around this point, Tamadon is also told (by the cleric on the right (Tamadon is on the left), who is the main interlocutor) You lack knowledge.)


Possibly, grateful that the men are there at all, he falls into the trap of being too nice to them**, and then this felt like a bit of a wasted opportunity, for, although at the level of intelligent undergraduate debate, it was good enough, there are things that anyone should be wise to :

* Not allowing the other participants to define the position that one is defending (or attacking from)

* Not allowing extreme examples or cases to be used, or false dichotomies (as if the choice is only between A and B, and there is no C, etc.)


In this film, Tamadon only weakly defends the assertion that his argument is for ‘secularism’ – the others say the word a few times, and, by attrition, he accepts it, and then ends up with a false label to what he is seeking. This label is then, necessarily, used against him.

For he also allows his guests to refer to the case of naked protesters in Holland (although, to be honest, Das englische Garten in München is where people are allowed to be freely naked outdoors and in public) and then to brand him with dictatorship, under the guise of having made a claim for secularism, because he says that he had not been proposing for nudity to be allowed – this line of argument had, after all, started with the requirement in Iran (whether or not part of Islamic law as such, or of the law of an Islamic Republic – this dis disputed between him and then, and not resolved) of women being veiled.

There was much good humour, not least when, on arrival (and later) the idea of avoiding religious taxes is invoked in relation to Tamadon’s mother’s largely unused property (since his sister and he both live abroad). But too much of the humour is allowed to be at Tamadon’s expense, and the theatricality of one cleric, in getting him to answer a broad Yes or No question, and his then falling into some trap based on the bogus notion of an excluded middle, and even calling him ‘cunning’ more than once.

For, no, if he were even a good debater, let alone a cunning one, Tamadon would say So what if 98% of those who voted 34 years ago voted for The Islamic Republic – two generations have been born since, and how many people who voted then are now alive ? Instead, he weakly says that his parents voted for it, but they did not know what it was going to be (and any such appeal to the individual case, Tamadon’s or anything that was not a generality, was just jumped on).

Against which, science and scientifically established fact kept being invoked – a woman singing (only allowed if a woman sings to an audience only of women) is said to evoke lust in men, and that men are more inspired to lust by, say, seeing a woman’s bare head. Tamadon’s arguments for self-control then sounded regressive, because the high ground had been taken by asserting a scientific basis for the claims, not least when the argument is that it is necessary men’s inclinations must be shielded by women not singing or being unveiled :

We were really in the puerile territory of judges who say that women had it coming with rape or sexual assault because of how they dressed, as if The Accused (1988) had never existed. These debaters are arguing that when a man is attracted to a woman it almost automatically and unavoidably ends in adultery, and this in a society without the loosening effect of (too much) alcohol, and whatever the film may have meant as its message is lost on such thinking.

This film is maybe not the only opportunity that there will be to argue the issues properly, and, when it came to what music could be played in the living-room, with the agreement of the five men, it was interesting that there was not a uniformity of view amongst the other four, and a willingness to allow in that special situation what could not and would not be sanctioned in society as a whole : an indication that, doctrinally, there was more room for movement, with one cleric who stated the official line, and yet what he could personally permit / accept there.

There was a good feel generally to seeing the shared life for these few days, and the prints on canvas, of the men’s libraries, that were used to decorate the walls gave a sense of their influences and viewpoints. However, all of these things were too little to outweigh the substantial poverty of good argument.


End-notes

* Of the fire in the garden, whose flames had been likened just before to those of hell.

** There are, after all, liberties that guests sometimes have, but hosts do not, and vice versa.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Monday 21 April 2014

I want to go to the park

This is a review of Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


Easter Monday

* Contains spoilers *

This is a review of Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998)



It was shown as part of the series The Cinema of Childhood (please visit the web-site at cinemaofchildhood.com for more information), which is presented by Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) and Filmhouse (@Filmhouse), and is introduced by Mark Cousins' film A Story of Children and Film (2013) (with Neil McGlone (@NeilMcGFilm)). At a special screening at The Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse), its director, Mohammad-Ali Talebi, was present to introduce the film and answer questions in a session hosted by Toby Miller (@tobytram) from FM 105’s Bums on Seats (@Bums_on_Seats)

In A Story of Children and Film (2013), Mark Cousins has held up director Mohammad-Ali Talebi’s film Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998) as an example of a child actor being allowed to be like a child, and, in Tweeting about the film, Cousins has called it ‘a tonic’ and ‘one of the best things that you could do with 80 mins’.



Rice establishes a mood that does not seem prone to abate, so we are genuinely uplifted when it does : a world of cynicism, complaint and grumbling, not just within the home, seems left behind. We had heard, in the words that Talebi (through his interpreter) gave by way of introduction, that the film was set just after the end of Iran’s war with Iraq (which ended in August 1988, after nearly eight years). Maybe, however, since Iran had become an Islamic Republic following the revolution (in 1979), and the deposition of the Shah, we expected that people might be less materialistic and not so quick to find fault.

Then again, these are people who have had to cope with years of war, and, apart from having the fact of continued rationing at its centre, the film has scenes that show us how fearful people are of losing a job or spending too much money. There is, to an extent, a sense of neighbourliness in queuing together for bread fresh from the oven, but tensions and frustrations quickly become apparent. However, criticizing or even obviously commenting on the extent to which the revolution had had an impact on everyday people’s lives does not seem to be part of Talebi’s purpose.

In the question-and-answer session, Talebi was asked whether, in a film that takes a good look at human nature, and seems to incorporate spiritual wisdom (such as sharing each other’s load), there had been a deliberate reference to Louis Malle’s Zazie. In fact, although Talebi says that he likes Malle’s films, he has not seen Zazie dans le métro (1960), and will seek it out when he gets home. Others, too, had said to him that they find a spiritual message in his films, and, although he is not saying that it is not there, it had not been his intention to put one there.

That said, he told us that one of the first things that he did on arriving in Cambridge had been to go into a Catholic church, and that watching people waiting to receive the sacrament had moved him to tears. Nonetheless, in a long and revealing answer to this question, he said that he relates more to the notion of humanity without a religious dimension. Once the observational part of the film gives way to adventure, a summary of what happens would not seem capable of filling the remaining minutes.

For the strength of the film is not in an elaborate plot, but in simplicity, and in the genuineness of the central performances from Jairan Abadzade (Jairan) and Masume Eskandari. We were told that, even so, some devices elicited Abadzade’s performance, such as giving her a toy for much of a day and then denying it to her, and that Eskandari’s polite assurances that she was happy with how the shooting was going were belied by being able to catch her, on a microphone, cursing how things were being handled. (In the screenplay, this insincerity is mirrored by her complaining to herself that Jairan talks so much, and attempting to hurry away to avoid being with her (the latter of which Jairan is aware, and remarks on it to her).)

The principal scene that first moves us is when another’s actions, after all that has been gone through to procure forty-five kilos of rice and get them onto the bus home, threaten to be fatal – until all on the bus play their part to save the day. A description in such broad terms does not permit for feeling either what happens or the scope for the film’s development, but the root lies in the interactions between child and adult, and in the former having the vision and faith for things to happen.

All of which ends in the richness of preparing a meal, and of involving those who live nearby – in a positive sense of community, sharing food with them, which makes the effort of getting the rice back redemptive and worthwhile.


Rice was screened with Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene I Verden) (1949) (which is reviewed here, and was shown first)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)